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If you've been paying attention on GitHub you will have noticed developers adding a new XML file to their repos over the last few months. Since the Symposium in Cologne in October I have been alluding to a Christmas present (my first presentation was 83 days til Christmas...). So here it is.

They’ve developed our own XML schema for documenting extension metadata (changelogs, versions, dependencies, authors etc.), which is similar to the packages.json that the node.js world is inheriting, so that this website, and one day Symphony, can consume and intelligently parse it.

The site allows developers to add their repositories in one click (after signing in with GitHub), and allows site builders to quickly discover new extensions by recency of update or by popularity. Check it out.

For developers you just need to publish your extension details to theXML file in your GitHub rep, and the site does the rest. For users, it's really easy to find extensions and their updates.

Maybe a little bit off-topic, but I still don't get the logic behind the "Symphony Community" account on GitHub. Can someone explain to me what kind of extensions are owned by "Symphony CMS", "Symphony Community" and which one are owned by their individual developers?

Just to outline though: Symphonists is there to take on extensions that the community deem 'important' and 'useful' for the future, that the original developer has decided, for any reason, to stop actively developing.

We will try to actively get in touch with the developer to ask if they would like us to take over development, and they can decide what to do.

Symphonists will not become a dumping ground for extensions, they must be actively used by the community and have a future of use too.

I have some time off this xmas, so I will dedicate some of it to writing this all up. This is a community effort, so I will have to discuss the finer details with those hardened developers that make up the WG, it's basically a work in progress.

"Symphony CMS" is what we often call "core team" — the official repository and core developers (Allen, Craig, Brendan et al). On this site the official extensions are added under the handle team, but on GitHub (and therefore symphonyextensions.com) the handle is symphonycms. "Symphony Community" is "community" on this website, but symphonists on GitHub and symphonyextensions.com. As John says, the Symphonists organisation is there as a collective of volunteers who are guardians of widely-used extensions that the original developer can no longer maintain themselves. For example when Alistair (one of the original Symphony core developers) moved on, his extensions were divided up between symphonycms as "official" extensions, and symphonists as useful extensions that we didn't want to disappear. A couple of other members of our community have moved on to new jobs or careers and we have given their extensions a home.

It most definitely isn't a dumping ground, and I know we have declined some extensions in the past on the grounds that they are not worth the overhead of maintaining and don't have a big enough user base.

1_ How is the dependency element supposed to be shown?

Right now it is not, but will add it to my list.

2_ How often is the content of an extension refreshed regarding to Github modifications?

A cron runs every two minutes which refreshes the oldest extension. There are currently 115 extensions, so it will take 230 minutes to cycle through them all.

Will you be generating RSS or Atom feeds in addition to the Twitter account?

You can grab an RSS feed from Twitter directly if you'd rather consume this way: